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I just signed on recently. I have been searching genealogy websites but no luck in tracing my GGrandmother's roots. I suppose those of us in the U.S. will have the similiar problems in tracing our roots out of Africa.
I can trace my father's line back to 375 years ago in Virginia and some have traced it to England and France, but I think I need to go back to the cemeteries and records in Alabama to try to get some idea of the immediate ancestry of my GGrandmother. I know that there was a slave owner with her last name in that area, and that the slave records of 1850 show a child who would have been her age, but from the later (beginnig in 1880) census records, her race is always listed as white, so perhaps she was several generations away from her African line? Or could she have been one of the children of the slaveowner and during the civil war (when she would have been a preteen and teenager) married a white man and started her family?
My Grandmother was born in 1868, not long after the civil war and into great misery and grinding poverty during the so-called "reconstruction period" in the South. Many records from that time were burned along with the courthouses that held them.
I think that we will just have to wait to see if DNA technology can answer lots of the guestions of from where we came and to whom are we linked. I hope it can eventually bring us closer than 52 generations out of Africa!!
Thanks Mr Mulkey for all the information and good work! I am pleased to see out little group is growing!!
Betty
I can trace my father's line back to 375 years ago in Virginia and some have traced it to England and France, but I think I need to go back to the cemeteries and records in Alabama to try to get some idea of the immediate ancestry of my GGrandmother. I know that there was a slave owner with her last name in that area, and that the slave records of 1850 show a child who would have been her age, but from the later (beginnig in 1880) census records, her race is always listed as white, so perhaps she was several generations away from her African line? Or could she have been one of the children of the slaveowner and during the civil war (when she would have been a preteen and teenager) married a white man and started her family?
My Grandmother was born in 1868, not long after the civil war and into great misery and grinding poverty during the so-called "reconstruction period" in the South. Many records from that time were burned along with the courthouses that held them.
I think that we will just have to wait to see if DNA technology can answer lots of the guestions of from where we came and to whom are we linked. I hope it can eventually bring us closer than 52 generations out of Africa!!
Thanks Mr Mulkey for all the information and good work! I am pleased to see out little group is growing!!
Betty